Tag Archives: Wins

Sandy Rivas, Senior Community Manager at Microsoft, was in New York City on November 15th to receive a Silver Stevie® Award for Women in Business in the Best New Product of the Year category.

The award was given in recognition of an innovation that Sandy and her team implemented across Microsoft’s Business Applications Communities, called Intelligent Content Syndication™ (ICS). Learn more about this powerful tool by reading the full article in the Power BI community.

(Reuters) — UPS on Tuesday said it won the U.S. government’s first full approval to operate a drone airline, which gave it a lead in the nascent U.S. drone delivery business over rivals Amazon and Alphabet.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) granted UPS’ Flight Forward drone subsidiary a Part 135 Standard certification on Friday. The company said the certificate allows it to expand its delivery service in campus settings such as hospitals and universities, but added that residential deliveries are years away.

The certification allows UPS pilots to fly drones beyond their line of sight and opens the door for the delivery company to expand Flight Forward. The fledgling unit is immediately doubling the number of drone flights it does for its flagship customer, Raleigh, North Carolina’s WakeMed Health & Hospitals.

“We’ll easily get to 20-plus flights per day, per drone,” said Scott Price, UPS’ chief strategy and transformation officer.

“It’s a business, it’s not a prototype or a test,” Price said of Flight Forward, which is paid to ferry blood and tissue samples to WakeMed’s central laboratory from points around its main hospital campus.

UPS said its latest certification clears the way for Flight Forward to add other campus delivery projects without seeking government approvals for each one.

“There are hundreds of campuses in the United States,” said Price, who added that UPS is eyeing drone deliveries on hospital, corporate and university campuses as it builds Flight Forward.

“This is a big step forward in safely integrating unmanned aircraft systems into our airspace,” U.S. Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao said in a statement.

Under the new FAA approval, UPS Flight Forward pilots may now operate multiple drones under one certificate.

Earlier this year, Alphabet’s Wing, the sister unit of search engine Google, was the first company to get U.S. air carrier certification for a single-pilot drone operation. It is testing home deliveries in a rural area around Blacksburg, Virginia.

Amazon, known for its splashy drone delivery tests, also has won experimental certifications to test its drones.

The FAA is writing rules for drone operations, including guidelines for sharing airspace with passenger planes and flying over populated areas.

Residential deliveries, Price said, are “years out.”

(Reporting by Lisa Baertlein in Los Angeles; Editing by David Gregorio)

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) kicked off the Subterranean Challenge in December 2017, with the goal of equipping future warfighters and first responders with tools to rapidly map, navigate, and search hazardous underground environments. The final winner of the four-event competition won’t be selected until 2021, but Team Explorer from Carnegie Mellon University and Oregon State University managed to best rivals for the initial prize.

On four occasions during the eight-day Tunnel Circuit event, which concluded today, each team deployed multiple robots into National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health research mines in South Park Township, Pennsylvania, tasked with autonomously navigating mud and water and communicating with each other and a base station for an hour at a time as they searched for objects. Team Explorer’s roughly 30 university faculty, students, and staff members leveraged two ground robots and two drones to find 25 artifacts in its two best runs (14 more than any other team), managing to identify and locate a backpack within 20 centimeters of its actual position.

“Mobility was a big advantage for us,” said team co-leader Sebastian Scherer, associate research professor in Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute, in a statement. “The testing [prior to the event, at Tour-Ed Mine in Tarentum, Pennsylvania] was brutal at the end, but it paid off in the end. We were prepared for this … We had big wheels and lots of power, and autonomy that just wouldn’t quit.”

Team Explorer — which has the backing of the Richard King Mellon Foundation, Schlumberger, Microsoft, Boeing, Flir Systems, Near Earth Autonomy, Epson, Lord, and Doodle Labs — is one of 11 teams competing for a portion of the Subterranean Challenge’s combined $ 4.5 million prize pool. Future events will involve an Urban Circuit, where robots will explore complex underground facilities, and a Cave Circuit, where the robots will operate in natural caves.

“All the teams worked very hard to get here, and each took a slightly different approach to the problem,” said Team Explorer co-leader Matt Travers, a system scientist at CMU’s Robotics Institute. “This was a great experience for all of us and we are proud of the performance by our team members and our robots.”

The Subterranean Challenge also includes the Virtual track, in which DARPA-funded and self-funded teams are developing software using models of systems, environments, and terrain to compete in simulation-based events and explore larger-scale runs. The winner will earn up to $ 1.5 million in the final event, with additional prizes of up to $ 500,000 for self-funded teams in each of four Virtual Circuit events.

Congratulations to UBS Card Center on winning the Security Innovation of the Year award at the Retail Banker International Awards. UBS Card Center’s fraud team used the latest artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities in the FICO® Falcon® Platform to stop 84 percent more fraudulent transactions last year than in 2015.

“We are combining our deep expertise in analyzing fraud trends and the latest breakthroughs in AI and machine learning from FICO to keep losses and false-positives low and customer satisfaction high,” said Marcel Drescher, Head of Fraud Services, UBS Card Center (shown above with Manuela Spillmann). “We are gratified by this industry award recognizing our success in stopping fraud.”

UBS Card Center processes roughly 25 percent of all credit cards in Switzerland. The need to optimise costs in the face of fierce competition meant UBS Card Center had to keep fraud write-offs to the very minimum. They were facing new fraud attack volumes but needed to uphold the highest standards for customer experience and satisfaction. This required the use of machine learning to minimize consumer interruptions while investigating more potential cases of fraud, all without adding staff.

To tackle this multi-dimensional problem, fraud experts at UBS Card Center used the free-form rule writing within the FICO Falcon Platform to create complex rules that deployed multiple AI techniques, includingadaptive analytics. Adaptive analytics use the results of recent fraud investigations to automatically fine-tune the underlying neural networks in order to accurately reflect the latest fraud landscape. These custom rules, combined with the advanced analytics, were the only way to improve false-positives and fraud detection rates.

Using FICO AI and machine learning, UBS Card Center managed to investigate and resolve 42 percent more fraud alerts without bringing in new staff resources.

“UBS Card Center has reduced the amount of fraud write-offs per compromised card, stopped more fraudulent transactions and mitigated false-positive rates using the FICO Falcon Platform,” said Douglas Blakey, Group Editor Consumer Finance at Timetric Financial Services, which hosted the awards.

I have written about the power of optimization — here is a great case study showing how it can solve problems that previously seemed unsolvable. Ørsted, the world’s leading offshore wind farm developer, has used FICO® Xpress Optimization to develop a novel digital energy optimization solution for designing an important part of their wind farms. For its achievement, Ørsted was awarded a 2018 FICO® Decisions Award for AI, Machine Learning & Optimization.

This Danish company has 30 wind farms in operation or under construction, so improving efficiency has a big payoff. In this case, they were able to achieve significant savings while reducing overall design time and improving its ability to investigate different scenarios.

What did they do? In offshore wind farms, the power produced by the turbines is sent via cables to transformer substations, where the power is bundled and sent to shore. With our technology, Ørsted developed a tool called OptiArray to optimally design the cable layout connecting the turbines to the substations.

What does this mean for the business?

Ørsted realized significant savings which are applicable across their entire business.

Ørsted engineers can look for new ways to drive down cost of electricity by testing many “what-if” scenarios.

The success proved the power of mathematical programming in general and FICO Xpress in particular, encouraging other parts of the business to use the power of optimal decision making.

But it’s not just Ørsted that benefits from breakthroughs in energy optimization. As Sid Dash, research director at Chartis Research, noted, “Innovations like this will help to make renewables a bigger piece of the global energy supply picture.” Indeed, wind farm design is a hot area for the use of optimization — two years ago, another FICO customer, Wind Farm Designs, won the same FICO Decisions Award.

For decades, games have served as benchmarks for artificial intelligence (AI).

In 1996, IBM famously set loose Deep Blue on chess, and it became the first program to defeat a reigning world champion (Garry Kasparov) under regular time controls. But things really kicked into gear in 2013 — the year Google subsidiary DeepMind demonstrated an AI system that could play Pong, Breakout, Space Invaders, Seaquest, Beamrider, Enduro, and Q*bert at superhuman levels. In March 2016, DeepMind’s AlphaGo won a three-game match of Go against Lee Sedol, one of the highest-ranked players in the world. And only a year later, an improved version of the system (AlphaZero) handily defeated champions at chess, a Japanese variant of chess called shogi, and Go.

The advancements aren’t merely advancing game design, according to folks like DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis. Rather, they’re informing the development of systems that might one day diagnose illnesses, predict complicated protein structures, and segment CT scans. “AlphaZero is a stepping stone for us all the way to general AI,” Hassabis told VentureBeat in a recent interview. “The reason we test ourselves and all these games is … that [they’re] a very convenient proving ground for us to develop our algorithms. … Ultimately, [we’re developing algorithms that can be] translate[ed] into the real world to work on really challenging problems … and help experts in those areas.”

With that in mind, and with 2019 fast approaching, we’ve taken a look back at some of 2018’s AI in games highlights. Here they are for your reading pleasure, in no particular order.

Montezuma’s Revenge

In Montezuma’s Revenge, a 1984 platformer from publisher Parker Brothers for the Atari 2600, Apple II, Commodore 64, and a host of other platforms, players assume the role of intrepid explorer Panama Joe as he spelunks across Aztec emperor Montezuma II’s labyrinthine temple. The stages, of which there are 99 across three levels, are filled with obstacles like laser gates, conveyor belts, ropes, ladders, disappearing floors, and fire pits — not to mention skulls, snakes, spiders, torches, and swords. The goal is to reach the Treasure Chamber and rack up points along the way by finding jewels, killing enemies, and revealing keys that open doors to hidden stages.

Montezuma’s Revenge has a reputation for being difficult (the first level alone consists of 24 rooms), but AI systems have long had a particularly tough go of it. DeepMind’s groundbreaking Deep-Q learning network in 2015 — one which surpassed human experts on Breakout, Enduro, and Pong — scored a 0 percent of the average human score of 4,700 in Montezuma’s Revenge.

Researchers peg the blame on the game’s “spare rewards.” Completing a stage requires learning complex tasks with infrequent feedback. As a result, even the best-trained AI agents tend to maximize rewards in the short term rather than work toward a big-picture goal — for example, hitting an enemy repeatedly instead of climbing a rope close to the exit. But some AI systems this year managed to avoid that trap.

DeepMind

In a paper published on the preprint server Arxiv.org in May (“Playing hard exploration games by watching YouTube“), DeepMind described a machine learning model that could, in effect, learn to master Montezuma’s Revenge from YouTube videos. After “watching” clips of expert players and by using a method that embedded game state observations into a common embedding space, it completed the first level with a score of 41,000.

In a second paper published online the same month (“Observe and Look Further: Achieving Consistent Performance on Atari“), DeepMind scientists proposed improvements to the aforementioned Deep-Q model that increased its stability and capability. Most importantly, they enabled the algorithm to account for reward signals of “varying densities and scales,” extending its agents’ effective planning horizon. Additionally, they used human demonstrations to augment agents’ exploration process.

In the end, it achieved a score of 38,000 on the game’s first level.

OpenAI

Above: An agent controlling the player character.

Image Credit: OpenAI

In June, OpenAI — a nonprofit, San Francisco-based AI research company backed by Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, and Peter Thiel — shared in a blog post a method for training a Montezuma’s Revenge-beating AI system. Novelly, it tapped human demonstrations to “restart” agents: AI player characters began near the end of the game and moved backward through human players’ trajectories on every restart. This exposed them to parts of the game which humans had already cleared, and helped them to achieve a score of 74,500.

In August, building on its previous work, OpenAI described in a paper (“Large-Scale Study of Curiosity-Driven Learning“) a model that could best most human players. The top-performing version found 22 of the 24 rooms in the first level, and occasionally discovered all 24.

What set it apart was a reinforcement learning technique called Random Network Distillation (RND), which used a bonus reward that incentivized agents to explore areas of the game map they normally wouldn’t have. RND also addressed another common issue in reinforcement learning schemes — the so-called noisy TV problem — in which an AI agent becomes stuck looking for patterns in random data.

“Curiosity drives the agent to discover new rooms and find ways of increasing the in-game score, and this extrinsic reward drives it to revisit those rooms later in the training,” OpenAI explained in a blog post. “Curiosity gives us an easier way to teach agents to interact with any environment, rather than via an extensively engineered task-specific reward function that we hope corresponds to solving a task.”

On average, OpenAI’s agents scored 10,000 over nine runs with a best mean return of 14,500. A longer-running test yielded a run that hit 17,500.

Uber

OpenAI and DeepMind aren’t the only ones that managed to craft skilled Montezuma’s Revenge-playing AI this year. In a paper and accompanying blog post published in late November, researchers at San Francisco ride-sharing company Uber unveiled Go-Explore, a family of so-called quality diversity AI models capable of posting scores of over 2,000,000 and average scores over 400,000. In testing, the models were able to “reliably” solve the entire game up to level 159 and reach an average of 37 rooms.

To reach those sky-high numbers, the researchers implemented an innovative training method consisting of two parts: exploration and robustification. In the exploration phase, Go-Explore built an archive of different game states — cells — and the various trajectories, or scores, that lead to them. It chose a cell, returned to that cell, explored the cell, and, for all cells it visited, swapped in a given new trajectory if it was better (i.e., the score was higher).

This “exploration” stage conferred several advantages. Thanks to the aforementioned archive, Go-Explore was able to remember and return to “promising” areas for exploration. By first returning to cells (by loading the game state) before exploring from them, it avoided over-exploring easily reached places. And because Go-Explore was able to visit all reachable states, it was less susceptible to deceptive reward functions.

The robustification step, meanwhile, acted as a shield against noise. If Go-Explore’s solutions were not robust to noise, it robustified them into a deep neural network with an imitation learning algorithm.

“Go-Explore’s max score is substantially higher than the human world record of 1,219,200, achieving even the strictest definition of ‘superhuman performance,’” the team said. “This shatters the state of the art on Montezuma’s Revenge both for traditional RL algorithms and imitation learning algorithms that were given the solution in the form of a human demonstration.”

This story was originally published on the E-Commerce Times on July 23, 2018, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series.

Gamification is one of the hottest trends in the business world. Incorporating game elements can be a great way to motivate and engage customers and employees alike — using an activity that has appealed to humankind since its beginnings.

“Humans have been playing games for thousands of years. Some argue that games predate culture,” said Brandon Marsala, creative director of content and strategy atMindspace.

“Knucklebone dice and painted stones were used by ancient peoples to hone skills, develop critical thinking, or just pass the time,” he told the E-Commerce Times. “Games are a part of us. Whether it’s competition with others or competition with ourselves, games are miniature versions of our lives: We strive to achieve — to overcome challenges.”

The appeal of games is due, at least in part, to how the brain is wired.

“Winning is tied into the pleasure circuits of the brain,” said Marsala. “Every time we achieve, dopamine is released — achieve bigger goals, release larger amounts of dopamine. In this way, humans are hardwired to want to play games.”

Customize for Your Customers

If you’ve ever earned airline miles or shopping points, you’ve participated in gamification. Increasing numbers of businesses have been using gamified strategies like these to increase customer engagement and help sales.

The basic principle behind gamification for customers is to make shopping fun — reward them for their participation, encourage them to continue interacting with your brand, and foster a sense of loyalty.

In addition to offering basic rewards programs, businesses can weave game psychology, principles and mechanics into all of their content, including their sales and marketing strategies.

“Advanced gamification is about adding value, serving the needs of the content, and achieving behavior change,” noted Marsala.

“Appointment dynamics” is an example of this kind of advanced gamification, he said.

“This is a dynamic in which to succeed, one must return at a predefined time to take some action, explained Marsala. “This can be implemented easily by offering bonuses or rewards for coming back to an experience on a certain day or at a certain time of day.”

What gamification strategies are best for your customers depends your particular business, products and audience. It’s important to customize them for each business.

“Gamification will continue to become much more custom and refined to meet an organization’s unique needs and goals,” said Marsala.

“Points, badges and leaderboards will still continue to be used, but they will no longer be seen as checking the box on gamification. They might be a starting point, but they are far from a complete gamification solution,” he added.

“Marketers and learning and development organizations alike will continue to see the value in gamifying their content and developing custom gamification strategies that motivate and inspire their increasingly distracted audiences,” Marsala predicted.

Boost Morale, Boost Sales

In addition to increasing sales, gamification can also be used internally to boost morale and increase engagement of employees.

“Gamification in business is a fantastic way to promote transparency and maximize participation within the company,” said John Kampas, CEO ofEmpist.

“This can be done either company-wide or by department,” he told the E-Commerce Times. “In my experience, people love this method because it builds a healthy level of competition with measurable goals based on quantifiable indicators. Everyone likes to be rewarded.”

There are many ways to incorporate gaming into the everyday working lives of employees, and you can start by looking for places within your business that need a little extra help.

“Identify the areas within your company that may need a boost,” Kampas advised.

“For instance, sales might be one of them. Gamification can be used to transform disengaged people into top performers,” he pointed out.

“For a sales team, you can incorporate a rewards program for your team based on sales KPIs –key performance indicators — to meet and exceed your goals,” suggested Kampas. “When the KPIs are achieved, people can get points and redeem them for cool perks. This can be in the form of gift cards, company swag, or an extra day off, to name a few options.”

At its best, gamification works in tandem with other strategies related to employee psychology and motivation.

“Games appeal to people’s core psychological drives, like the desire for social recognition, sense of ownership and accomplishment,” observed Tal Valler, director of global marketing atGamEffective.

“As you advance in levels and make achievements, you become more involved and more protective of your achievements,” he told the E-Commerce Times.

“While playing a game, you get instant feedback on your activities and have clear goals and a clear path to them,” Valler said. “Gamification, when done well, can take all these elements and use them to make learning or work activities more exciting and give them additional meaning.”

Make Games Winnable

Both external and internal gamification strategies must make sense in relation to your business’ overall values and mission. They shouldn’t feel, in other words, like they’re tacked onto existing structures, with no sense of coherence or continuity.

“Employee and customer gamification have some of the same principles, but they will each be rewarded differently,” he noted.

“The programs need to be easy to play and winnable,” Kampas advised. “A lengthy process or extensive rules can be unappealing to participants. You must also clearly outline the details of the challenge and the reward before starting the game.”

It’s also important that any gamification elements be accessible through mobile devices.

“Make sure it is optimized for mobile, because integrating it with social media is a great way to increase your brand exposure and company awareness,” suggested Kampas. “A social gamification example could be awarding points with a social share or like.”

Gamification shows tremendous promise, and it can be an effective way to motivate both customers and employees. As it evolves, it likely will take new forms, adapting to new technologies and trends. It shows no signs of slowing down.

“We are seeing an amazing impact with gamification for businesses,” said Kampas.

“There are many platforms out there that make it easy for a company to incorporate gamification and recognition into their businesses, both for employees and customers,” he added. “The good thing is you don’t need to recreate the wheel to be successful at this method — but if you are not thinking about gamification at this point, you definitely need to. It’s more than just a buzzword. It has become a proven tool to engage customers and employees.”

Vivian Wagner has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2008. Her main areas of focus are technology, business, CRM, e-commerce, privacy, security, arts, culture and diversity. She has extensive experience reporting on business and technology for a variety
of outlets, including The Atlantic, The Establishment and O, The Oprah Magazine. She holds a PhD in English with a specialty in modern American literature and culture. She received a first-place feature reporting award from the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists.Email Vivian.

The BET “HIP HOP AWARDS” 2018 brought the heat to Miami, Florida on Saturday, October 6, 2018 for the annual taping of the most prominent hip hop showcase on television. Comedian and Actor Deray Davis hosted hip-hop’s biggest night of the year at The Fillmore Miami Beach at Jackie Gleason Theater. THE BET “HIP HOP AWARDS” 2018 premiered on Tuesday, October 16, 2018 at 8:00PM ET.

Cardi B reigned supreme with four wins for ‘MVP of the Year’, ‘Hustler of the Year’,

‘Made-You-Look Award (Best Hip Hop Style)’, and ‘Sweet 16,’ for her verse on Migos’ “Motorsport.” The Carters followed closely picking up three awards for ‘Album of the Year’, ‘Best Collabo’ and ‘Single of the Year’ for “Apes**t”. XXXTentacion, who passed away earlier this year, was awarded for ‘Best New Artist.’ Anderson .Paak took to the stage for a tribute to his friend Mac Miller, who also passed away unexpectedly in 2018. Lil Wayne took home the night’s biggest honor, the ‘I Am Hip Hop Award’ for his over two decades of contributions to hip hop culture.

The show opened with a spellbinding performance by Lil Pump featuring Gucci Maneperforming a medley of “Esskeetit,” “Kept Back,” and “Gucci Gang.” Lil Baby & Gunna kept it sexy with performances of “Yes, Indeed,” “Yosemite,” and “Drip Too Hard.” Yella Beezy brought everyone to their feet with his performance of “That’s On Me.” Over at Club Liv, Cardi B was joined by Pardison Fontaine where they performed a medley of club bangers including “Get Up 10″ and “Backin’ It Up.” YG and A$ AP ROCKY got the crowd ready for anything with their performance of “Band Drum.” T.I. took us to an exotic nightclub for his performance “Jefe” and brought out Yo Gotti for a special performance of their single “Wraith.” Young M.A. brought down the house with her performance of “Petty Wap,” before presenting the award for ‘DJ of the Year.’ Flipp Dinero kept the energy going with his performance of “Leave Me Alone.” Lil Duval hit the stage with a much-anticipated performance of his Billboard Chart-topping hit,“Smile (Living My Best Life)” featuring Ball Greezy.

The complete list of 2018 BET “Hip Hop Awards” winners are:

Best Hip-Hop Video

Childish Gambino – “This is America”

Best Collabo, Duo or Group

The Carters – “APES**T”

Hot Ticket Performer

Drake

Lyricist of the Year

Kendrick Lamar

Video Director of the Year

Karena Evans

DJ of the Year

DJ Khaled

Producer of the Year

Pharrell Williams

MVP of the Year

Cardi B

Single of the Year

“Apes**t” – Produced By Pharrell (The Carters)

Album of the Year

The Carters – Everything Is Love

Best New Hip-Hop Artist

XXXTentacion

Hustler of the Year

Cardi B

Made-You-Look Award (Best Hip-Hop Style)

Cardi B

Best Hip-Hop Online Site/ App

Worldstar

Best Mixtape

BlocBoy JB – “Simi”

Sweet 16: Best Featured Verse

Cardi B – “Motorsport” (Migos Feat. Cardi B & Nicki Minaj)

Impact Track

Childish Gambino – “This Is America”

Jesse Collins, CEO of Jesse Collins Entertainment, served as Executive Producer of the BET Hip Hop Awardsalong with Connie Orlando, BET Head of Programming and Jeannae Rouzan–Clay, Vice President of Specials, Jesse Collins Entertainment.

BET.com/HipHopAwards is the official site for the BET “HIP HOP AWARDS” 2018 where fans can visit to get up-to-date info on this year’s show and take a look back on past BET Hip Hop Awards. The BET “HIP HOP AWARDS” 2018 will premiere on Tuesday, October 16, 2018 at8:00PM ET.

This is the first of two posts related to Adobe — the first one is by Chris Fletcher, and the second one is by me from more of an Adobe-Microsoft partnership standpoint. I know Dreamforce just passed us by, and you want to hear my take on it. But first, these two posts. I figured I’d wait until Dreamforce was over — since no one in the tech world would pay attention to anything except around Dreamforce.

Chris is eminently qualified to speak on this topic. Chris was a Gartner analyst, and martech was one of the domains he covered for years. It in fact predates Gartner to when he was an analyst at AMR, a company that Gartner acquired in 2009.

He has more than a decade in the space. So, Chris, now an independent analyst, knows from what he speaks. He, knowing him, would be too humble to tell you how trusted he is as an analyst to give a fair assessment of a company — good or bad. But, trust me, he’s trusted.

Not only all that, but he is a truly good person who is nothing but kind-hearted and honest to a fault. I welcome him here. If you want to reach him, email him: Chris.Fletcher@AegeanGroup.tech

Take it away, Chris.

Featured stories

Adobe just announced its acquisition of Marketo, a leading marketing automation SaaS platform that supports (mostly) B2B marketing campaigns and lead management. Although the acquisition price is an eye-popping $ 4.75 billion (Vista Equity Partners acquired Marketo for about $ 1.8 billion not long ago), the acquisition is a net positive for Adobe and for its customers, but possibly not so positive for Marketo competitors. I’ve been covering Marketo and its competitors in the B2B marketing segment since about 2013, when I researched and wrote the inaugural Magic Quadrant for CRM Lead Management (and four follow-on MQs in 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017).

Here’s what you need to know

Marketo competes mostly in the B2B marketing automation/campaign management segment (although it also showed its ability to scale the Marketo platform and compete in the crowded B2C marketing segment a couple of years ago).

Marketo’s primary competitors include: Salesforce (mostly Pardot, but also parts of the Marketing Cloud); Oracle (mostly Eloqua, but also BlueKai, Responsys, and Content Marketing); IBM (currently called Watson Campaign Automation, but in reality a mash-up of the former Unica product, Silverpop, analytics from multiple platforms, and, of course, Watson); and in some use cases, SAP. Non-direct competitors include HubSpot (B2B marketing and lead management, but focused on SMB and mid-sized companies), Pegasystems, bpm’online, and a few others.

Surprisingly (to me, at least), Microsoft has mostly been a no-show in this segment; Its acquisition of MarketingPilot did little to strengthen its offerings, and while Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a strong CRM product, it lacks native marketing automation capability that can compete with the leaders, though it does provide it B2C via the Adobe partnership.

The B2B marketing segment has been incredibly hot over the past five to seven years, building in part on the investments in CRM and specifically SFA that companies have made. After investing millions in CRM/SFA platforms, and fueling a multi-billion-dollar CRM market, companies are now looking to maximize their investments by feeding the sales machine.

The B2B Marketing/Lead Management market is still under-penetrated, leaving Adobe, Salesforce, Oracle, et al., a lot of room for growth. The single most dominant B2B marketing platform continues to be a home-grown combination of email marketing, SEO/SEM, database tools, postal mail (yes, paper…), and Microsoft Office/Office 365. By the way, Marketo and its competitors also sell into business segments that sell to consumers: Financial services, insurance, and other considered purchases (think: large financial investment, complex product, emotional, or significant decision) all act very much like B2B sales and leverage the same technology.

Who wins?

Users. Marketo is a solid product and arguably one of the top three marketing products on the market today (I deliberately left out the “SaaS” designation, because any/all of the interesting marketing products today are SaaS — that is now a given). While Marketo is a good/great product company, I have heard consistently from user organizations that Marketo was not as strong a “customer company” as some of its competitors, notably Salesforce and Adobe, which consistently score very highly in this area. I believe the Adobe acquisition will change this.

Adobe. Adobe has (finally) grown its product breadth to include digital commerce (note its recent acquisition of Magento) and B2B marketing. While its Adobe Campaign product (based on Neolane, which it acquired about five years ago) claimed to support B2B marketing, it was mostly a B2C marketing product and Adobe shied away from B2B deals. Adobe sales teams and partners now have a highly competitive B2B marketing/lead management product to compete with offerings from Salesforce, Oracle, and similar CRM vendors.

Who to watch?

Salesforce. Salesforce now has a direct competitive threat from Adobe. Prior to the acquisition of Marketo (and of Magento), Adobe and Salesforce previously competed mostly in the consumer marketing/B2C space, which thrives on high volume, consumer-facing tech like email marketing, digital ads, and content marketing. Note that Marketo has historically been very dependent on Salesforce, with a majority (I believe north of 75 percent) of its customers using Sales Cloud. Note also that, because Marketo sells into Salesforce customers, the Salesforce Pardot product is a competitor in almost every Marketo deal.

Oracle: Oracle’s Eloqua product is a direct competitor to Marketo and has both the marketing technology and the corporate presence of Oracle to compete effectively with Adobe/Marketo. Oracle has invested heavily in the marketing segment, acquiring Eloqua, Responsys, BlueKai, and Datalogix (as well as ATG and Endeca for commerce and intelligence) and will continue to be a Top 3 competitor in the segment.

Microsoft: As noted, Microsoft’s lack of presence in marketing is surprising, both because of the size and growth of the segment as well as because of its strong Dynamics 365 product. On the other hand, Adobe lacks SFA and customer contact/support technology in its product line; it will be interesting to see what happens with the Microsoft/Adobe partnership on the heels of this acquisition.

HubSpot: While HubSpot competes almost exclusively in the SMB and mid-sized business segments, tit has a product that works well for its target market and a very strong and enthusiastic partner network. HubSpot will likely benefit from the increased visibility on B2B marketing/lead management that the Marketo acquisition will generate.

What to do?

Current Marketo customers can sit tight, secure in knowing that Adobe will continue to support, and over time extend, the Marketo product. Expect deeper integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365, as both Adobe and MSFT continue their alliance. (And watch for further development based on the recently announced Adobe/Microsoft/SAP Open Data Initiative announced about a week after the Marketo announcement). Marketo users can expect more sales calls from their Adobe rep, as Adobe looks to expand their account presence.

Salesforce Sales Cloud customers using Marketo can also sit tight: Integration with Salesforce Sales Cloud will not go away. Despite the co-operation scenario with Adobe and Salesforce, too many major customers are using Sales Cloud + Marketo for that to change. Expect more sales calls from your Adobe rep as per above.

Microsoft Dynamics 365/CRM/CRM Online customers and partners may see the biggest change, and the biggest improvements in integration between MSFT and Marketo. Plan for current integrations between MSFT CRM and Marketo to continue (and likely adding better support for MSFT Azure along the way). Watch for additional integration between Marketo and Adobe Marketing Cloud products, track progress with ODI, and evaluate whether this is useful for your organization. Cross-vendor data models and the elimination of “customer data silos” has been talked about since the early days of CRM, but they have mostly benefited only a small number of user organizations. It’s a great idea, but I recommend a “wait and see” position on ODI.

Bottom line:

Watch for Adobe to become more active in the B2B market and to develop integration with Adobe Marketing Cloud and other marketing tools in their portfolio. Expect Salesforce to double down on Pardot by proposing it in every B2B Sales Cloud deal. Microsoft will likely stress its current integrations between Dynamics 365 and Adobe, and will put more resource and attention on integration between Marketing and Dynamics. We will continue to see consolidation in the B2B marketing segment over the coming year, but we will also see new investment as vendors and end user organizations look to maximize the value of their CRM and SFA platforms.

Thank you, sir! You will be seeing more from Chris here as time goes on. His knowledge is deep and his insights so worth it.

NOTE: Registrations for the CRM Watchlist 2019 and the Emergence Maturity Index 2019 are now closed. No exceptions. Thanks to all of those who submitted. For the rest of you: Well, maybe next time.

With the 2018 F1 season reaching its midpoint, ten teams and twenty drivers headed to Budapest for the final race before the summer break. A fair amount of rain made for a tricky qualifying performance, with Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas securing a 1-2 lockout of the grid despite the slick conditions, with both Ferrari drivers hot on their heels in 3-4.

With quick starts from both drivers, they were able to maintain their positions through turn one and kept the Ferraris at bay. As Bottas tussled with Kimi Raikkonen, Hamilton began putting serious distance between his car and the rest of the pack early in the race. With a blistering-hot track, pit stops and tire selection became even more critical.

As the laps passed by, Hamilton appeared downright unstoppable as the Ferraris worked together to break past Bottas. Vettel was able to sneak past, but not without some contact, damaging Bottas’s front wing.